Electronic dance music culture and religion: An Overview

This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through 'ritual' and 'festal'; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenological dance experience (especially 'ecstasy' and 'trance'); the dance community and a sense of belonging (the 'vibe' and 'tribes'); and EDMC as a new 'spirituality of life'. Moving beyond the cultural Marxist approaches of the 1970s, which held youth (sub)cultural expressions as 'ineffectual' and 'tragic', and the postmodernist approaches of the early 1990s, which held rave to be an 'implosion of meaning', recent anthropological and sociological approaches recognise that the various manifestations of this youth cultural phenomenon possess meaning, purpose and significance for participants. Contemporary scholarship thus conveys the presence of religiosity and spirituality within contemporary popular cultural formations. In conclusion, I suggest that this and continuing scholarship can offer useful counterpoint to at least one recent account (of clubbing) that overlooks the significance of EDMC through a restricted and prejudiced apprehension of 'religion'.

Culture and children's cosmology

In this investigation, we examined children's knowledge of cosmology in relation to the shape of the earth and the day-night cycle. Using explicit questioning involving a choice of alternative answers and 3D models, we carried out a comparison of children aged 4-9 years living in Australia and England. Though Australia and England have a close cultural affinity, there are differences in children's early exposure to cosmological concepts. Australian children who have early instruction in this domain were nearly always significantly in advance of their English counterparts. In general, they most often produced responses compatible with a conception of a round earth on which people can live all over without falling off. We consider coherence and fragmentation in children's knowledge in terms of the timing of culturally transmitted information, and in relation to questioning methods used in previous research that may have underestimated children's competence.

The impact of organizational culture and reshaping capabilities on change implementation success: The mediating role of readiness for change

It was hypothesized that employees' perceptions of an organizational culture strong in human relations values and open systems values would be associated with heightened levels of readiness for change which, in turn, would be predictive of change implementation success. Similarly, it was predicted that reshaping capabilities would lead to change implementation success, via its effects on employees' perceptions of readiness for change. Using a temporal research design, these propositions were tested for 67 employees working in a state government department who were about to undergo the implementation of a new end-user computing system in their workplace. Change implementation success was operationalized as user satisfaction and system usage. There was evidence to suggest that employees who perceived strong human relations values in their division at Time 1 reported higher levels of readiness for change at pre-implementation which, in turn, predicted system usage at Time 2. In addition, readiness for change mediated the relationship between reshaping capabilities and system usage. Analyses also revealed that pre-implementation levels of readiness for change exerted a positive main effect on employees' satisfaction with the system's accuracy, user friendliness, and formatting functions at post-implementation. These findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical contribution to the readiness for change literature, and in relation to the practical importance of developing positive change attitudes among employees if change initiatives are to be successful.